Carnegie African Diaspora Fellows Counter Brain Drain

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The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program (CADFP) has announced that 17 U.S. or Canadian based faculty members who are part of the African Diaspora have been selected to travel to Africa beginning this month to conduct joint projects with colleagues at host universities in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. The program has now selected and approved a total of 110 Fellows since its inception two years ago. In addition to the 17 Fellows announced this month, the program had previously announced awards to 33 Fellows in June 2014, and 60 Fellows in November 2014.
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The advisory council, comprised of academic leaders from Africa and prominent African diaspora academics, has remarked on the quick growth, high quality, and impact of the program, which allows African universities to take the lead in hosting African diaspora scholars at their institutions. According to Council Chair Dr. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of History at Quinnipiac University, “Diaspora academics constitute a critical facet of higher education internationalization. The connections fostered through them ultimately support capacity building and innovation in home and host countries.”

Many fellows have continued the work resulting from their academic collaborations after returning home, extending the impact of the fellowship on both their home campus in North America and their host campus in Africa, and both hosts and Fellows have identified the program as a positive catalyst for ongoing cooperation.

The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellows Program is managed by the Institute of International Education (IIE) in collaboration with Quinnipiac University, which chairs the Advisory Council, and is funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Dr. Zeleza?s vision for mobilization of Diaspora Scholars was recently cited in the draft declaration of the first African Higher Education Summit: Revitalizing Higher Education for Africa?s Future held in Dakar, Senegal in March. The declaration mandated a ?10/10 Initiative? which would send 10,000 Africans in diaspora to aid in projects across the continent over the next ten years.

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